Contemporary practice of medicine, especially in the areas of anesthesiology, critical care, intensive care and emergency room care, frequently requires the physician to pass a tube into the trachea of a patient, a procedure called endotracheal intubation, in order to provide a patent airway and prevent foreign material from entering the trachea and passing to the lungs, which might cause infection or varying degrees of collapse of the lungs. In order to intubate the trachea, it is necessary to expose the larynx. This ordinarily requires the displacement of the throat formations, primarily the epiglottis, which normally covers the larynx during the swallowing of food and water, and the passage of an appropriate tube past the vocal cords and into the trachea.
Endotracheal intubation normally is accomplished with an instrument called a laryngoscope which consists of two main portions, a handle and an elongated blade. Though some are formed of an integral piece, most current laryngoscopes have a handle and a blade formed in two separate, detachably connected parts. The handle usually is hollow and holds dry cell batteries necessary to power an illuminating lamp that is supported by the blade and employed to illuminate the throat cavity. A hinged joint is usually formed by and between the handle and the blade to permit their detachable connection. Presently available blades come in different sizes of two general types: the straight blade and the curved blade, and various modifications of each type of blade are also available. The various shapes, sizes and styles afford the physician with a variety of instruments to be used for different patient throat structures and conditions. All of the known available blades have one characteristic in common, viz., the tip of the blade is a part of, hence immovably fixed to, the body of the blade at a fixed angle. This constitutes one of the major disadvantages of known blades, which I have eliminated by my invention.